A forgotten report of remedies

One positive of frequent agitations by farmers is that the Swaminathan Commission has become a household name. There was a time when netas pacified angry farmers by visiting their village and promising an extra farm pond or a bore well. This will not work now. Over the past two years, the protesting farmers have been categorical in their demand for implementation of the Swaminathan Commission’s recommendations, which would ensure minimum support prices (MSPs) for crops at 1.5 times the production cost.

The downside, however, is that many people now think the commission studied only the issue of MSPs. The commission, formally called National Commission on Farmers, has made a series of suggestions to ease farm distress. MS Swaminathan was not the only member on the committee, there were others. But he headed it.

The commission produced five reports between December 2004 and October 2006 during UPA I. The fifth report was submitted in two volumes, covering ground well beyond MSPs, which is an important aspect of the report but not the only one. To make farming viable, the report says, five important areas of land, water, credit and insurance, technology and markets need to be examined. It also talks about the health of farmers’ children — 75 per cent of the kids were found to be underweight because of inadequate nutrition.

One of the commission’s key proposals is to form an ‘Indian Trade Organisation’, which will protect Indian farmers from volatile international markets that have adversely affected them since liberalisation.

The report suggests a pro-poor, gender-sensitive policy on livestock, highlights glitches that need to be ironed out to expand area under irrigation and reasons behind shrinking landholding. Whether one agrees with the proposals or not, they deserved consistent and nuanced discussions as they concern almost everyone connected to the rural economy. That’s 69 per cent of India. But 12 years after the proposals were submitted to the Centre, neither Parliament nor media has debated them in any depth or with any seriousness. The Congress-led UPA commissioned the report and sat on it for eight years. Narendra Modi and the BJP made it a big talking point in their 2014 election campaign, but forgot about it the moment they came to power.

Tired of waiting, tens of thousands of farmers have now gathered in Delhi. Their plan to gherao the Parliament over the next two days may look like an extraordinary event, but their demand is simple. They want lawmakers to hold a special Parliament session on the agrarian crisis and discuss, among other things, the report that played a part in landing them a seat in the House.

The protest should not come as a surprise: over 3 lakh farmers across the country have killed themselves in the past two decades. That’s over 40 per day.

But as horrific as they may sound, the figures don’t reveal the extent of the crisis. These are still conservative estimates because the real data is obscured by biases in society. If a woman in a farm household commits suicide, the police don’t immediately record her death as a farm suicide even though it’s a known fact that women work harder than men in the rural sector. The same thing happens when a tribal or a Dalit farmer who doesn’t own the land he/she tills commits suicide.

Instead of making the official reporting of such deaths more accurate, authorities, it seems, have stopped counting. The National Crime Records Bureau has not published data on farm suicides for two years. In 2014, 12 states declared that they had not witnessed any farm suicides. The same year, authorities changed the methodology and started categorising people involved in agriculture as farmers, tenant farmers, agriculture labourers and so on, in a bid to fudge numbers. P Sainath, a leading voice on the agrarian crisis, said the government started “hiding corpses in other columns”.

The Delhi stir, called Kisan Mukti March, is aimed at sending a message to our MPs: stop this scheme of deceit and circumlocution. It also seeks to wake up civil society, which has lost touch with rural realities. The protesting farmers don’t want just policy changes. They want more visibility, representation and dignity.

Ihave only one complaint with the organisers of the Kisan Mukti March and it is the timing of the stir. Elections are due in five states. Today, as farmers arrive in Delhi, Madhya Pradesh will go to polls. Telangana and Rajasthan will vote on December 7. For the next month, the mainstream media, which often ignores issues of rural areas, will focus on election coverage and farmers won’t get the spotlight they deserve. Some opinion polls have predicted that the BJP may lose in more than one state. Had the march been planned after the counting of votes on December 11, farm leaders would have been in a stronger position to discuss the demands with the BJP government at Centre. I know a section of the organisers wanted to hold the march after the results, but could not rally others around the idea. Regardless of the timing, the stir is expected to be one of the biggest farm demonstrations.

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